The Inspector of Youzhou (1)
Near the city of Ji in You Province, a band of defeated soldiers trudged along on leaden, lifeless steps. Their faded armor was caked with dust and dried blood, and the weapons each man carried looked worn enough to snap at any moment.
"...This is all my doing. I was the one who fell short."
The man at the head of the column muttered it with a look of utter defeat, and at that helpless murmur the officers around him hurriedly spoke up.
"No, my lord! How could any of this be your fault! The blame is ours, for failing to lead the army as we ought to have!"
"That's right! We deserve death a hundred times over—let your punishment fall upon us instead, I beg you!"
The officers' desperate pleas—cries of men who could not bear to watch their lord grieve—showed just how dearly this Inspector of Youzhou was loved.
The Inspector slowly shook his head.
"No. You fought Gongsun Zan's soldiers with valor. Had you not, would I have walked off that battlefield alive?"
Liu Yu had lost the better part of his soldiers in a single battle and fled the field.
"To think that all those men... and barely this handful left..."
An army that had once boasted tens of thousands now numbered scarcely a few hundred. Even now, the moment he closed his eyes, the image of Gongsun Zan carving through his soldiers rose vivid and merciless before him—the man leading the White Horse Volunteers, the most famed cavalry in all the realm, charging at the very head of his lines.
"Hahahaha! How could a bookworm who did nothing but read in the capital hope to stand against the White Horse General!"
"Charge! Teach that fool Liu Yu a lesson for attacking without knowing his own place!"
His character was base beyond redemption, but his art of war had been the genuine article. Gongsun Zan had seemed to see straight through the battlefield, as though every turn of it lay open before his eyes. With a man like that guarding the north, no tribe had ever dared so much as dream of crossing the border.
How much better it would have been, had he also possessed the mercy that thinks of the common people.
For now, Liu Yu had somehow survived and was leading what remained of his army back toward the city—but he understood at last that he could no longer stand against Gongsun Zan. The soldiers left to him were far too few to withstand a siege.
"Run, quickly! I shall hold the rear!"
"At last the hour has come to repay the grace my lord bestowed upon me."
"You dogs! If you would harm my lord, you shall step over my corpse first!"
Loyal soldiers who had volunteered to stay behind as the army broke and fled—men who had given their bodies, every last one of them, all to save their unworthy lord.
Liu Yu could not hold back the tears welling up from the deepest part of his heart. It had all happened—everything—because he himself had fallen short.
"How am I ever to face, in the world below, the faces of those who died for me..."
At his words the officers around him started in alarm.
"The world below, my lord! No—you must not speak so!"
Liu Yu shook his head.
"No. The road by which I might have lived is closed to me now."
Any further resistance would be futile—it would only inflame Gongsun Zan's temper. And then, to vent his rage, the man might well put innocent people to the sword.
"As things stand, it would be better to surrender at once—this very hour—and beg him to spare the people's lives, if nothing else."
"My lord!"
"If that man Gongsun Zan has any thought in his head at all, he will not kill the innocent folk of a city he has taken."
One of the officers near Liu Yu cried out in desperate protest.
"He is a man who drives his own subjects into forced labor and bleeds them dry! How can you speak of him so!"
Liu Yu's face darkened, as though to say there was no other way.
"...But if I defy him to the very end, the people of Ji may all die for it."
"That is—!"
"Recall the battle at Yangcheng, waged by the Hegemon-King of Chu."
At those words, the officers nearby found themselves unable to answer. The Hegemon-King Xiang Liang had buried alive every last resident of Yangcheng who had resisted him to the bitter end. It was a warning of what Gongsun Zan might do should things go ill—viciousness of exactly that stripe.
"Of course, he may not go so far as to commit such madness."
"Then even now—"
"But there will be people who die wrongfully, simply to sate his anger. Of that I am certain."
Exhaustion written across his face, Liu Yu let out a long sigh.
"I simply cannot bear it, if even one such person comes to exist on my account."
"My lord..."
"You said Gongsun Zan is even now following behind me, his army flush with triumph, did you not?"
With the air of a man already beyond life and death, Liu Yu spoke without strength.
"The moment I return to the city, I will surrender to Gongsun Zan."
Word soon arrived that Liu Yu, crushed in battle, had surrendered to Gongsun Zan after all. Gongsun Zan threw him into a cell while heaping mockery upon his head, and proclaimed that when the time was ripe, he would take it.
Countless commoners came flooding in to fall to their knees and beg for the old man's life—for the life of the Inspector of Youzhou—but Gongsun Zan paid them no heed whatsoever. Naturally, the eyes of the whole realm turned to him.
Most of the warlords assumed he would never truly kill so famed a figure as the Inspector of Youzhou—that this was mere intimidation. Their reasoning: he must be holding the city's people, and the tribes friendly to Liu Yu, hostage so that none of them would try anything foolish.
But a handful of more perceptive souls thought otherwise. They voiced their fears aloud: that Gongsun Zan was precisely the sort of brute who would kill the Inspector of Youzhou and never once look back at the consequences.
A powder keg one spark from igniting, in which the Inspector might be executed at any moment.
And at that very moment, the three Liu Bei sisters—dispatched on Jeong Reung's orders to rescue Liu Yu—were...
"...And where in the world is this?"
Lost, somewhere in the mountains of Bing Province.
Zhang Fei's face scrunched up in a flash of irritation, but then she slowly nodded to herself.
"Right. The roads aren't kept up and there are a ridiculous number of mountains out here. Getting lost isn't exactly strange."
"...Is there not a more fundamental reason than that?"
Guan Yu, looking distinctly troubled, urged her horse up alongside Zhang Fei's.
Zhang Fei shrugged.
"Hey, even so, I can't exactly play dumb about it."
Beside her as she said it lay the corpses of foreign tribesmen—the scourge of Bing Province, small packs that roamed together plundering one little village after another. The three sisters had simply come upon a band of raiders about to sack a village, and had dealt with them accordingly.
"You were rampaging right along with the rest of us, Sister Yunchang."
"...Ahem."
Just as blood was still dripping from Zhang Fei's serpent spear, so too was the Green Dragon Crescent Blade in Guan Yu's hands stained with the tribesmen's blood.
Liu Bei gave a wry smile and slid her sword back into its sheath.
"So what do we do now..."
Saving the village had been all well and good, but the killer was that in chasing down the fleeing raiders they had plunged far too deep into the mountains. Lost as they were, to make matters worse the sun was now slowly sinking toward the ridgeline. Night comes early to the mountains—and it is all the harsher for it.
Liu Bei heaved a sigh, lamenting that once again they were fated to camp out, poor and pitiful, in the middle of the mountains.
Just then, Zhang Fei and Guan Yu, mid-conversation, turned their heads toward the same spot at the very same instant.
"...What is it?"
"Someone is there."
When Liu Bei asked with a puzzled look, Guan Yu answered in a low, quiet voice.
"Come out. If you value your life."
Zhang Fei raised her still-dripping serpent spear and leveled it at a single point in the brush. Whether her threat did the trick or not, the thicket rustled, and the hidden figure stepped into view.
"O-okay, okay, I'm coming out—so could you point that terrifying thing somewhere else?"
Twin axes hanging at his waist. A bow and quiver slung across his back. Light armor tailored for easy movement—and, more striking than anything else, a black hood pulled low over his head.
At the sight of him, a single word slipped from Liu Bei's lips.
"A Black Mountain Bandit...?"
"Oh? What's this. You know who we are?"
A great bandit horde that had once held all of Bing Province in terror—but the one grinning at them now belonged to an elite guerrilla force that had since been absorbed into Lord Jeong Reung's command.
"We heard there were tribesmen about and came running as fast as our legs could carry us, but then word was somebody had already handled them, so we were poking around out of curiosity."
"...Not the best of hobbies."
Zhang Fei showed a flicker of displeasure at the fact that someone had been spying on them.
The Black Mountain Bandit, hands still raised over his head, spoke up.
"Er, real sorry about that, truly. If anything unusual turns up, we're obliged to confirm it firsthand and report it up the chain—no exceptions."
Perhaps she thought he had a point, for Zhang Fei made no particular move to argue.
"Still, that's something else. No one's ever once spotted us when we were lying low in the mountains."
"Can't vouch for the rest, but my instincts are top-notch."
"Hah. Now that I'm jealous of."
The Black Mountain Bandit nodded.
"Anyway, you look like you could use a hand. Want one?"
"..."
"Don't take it the wrong way—we've no intention of harming you."
With that, the Black Mountain Bandit turned his eye on the tribesmen's corpses strewn about. On every body the cuts and thrusts fell in different places, yet they all shared a single trait: each corpse bore exactly one wound.
Which is to say, they had sent the tribesmen to the afterlife one man, one strike, at a time. No ordinary skill could produce such work, and a chill crept down the bandit's spine.
"I really do want to help. That's all this is."
"..."
"You're lost right now, aren't you?"
"..."
True to form, the Black Mountain Bandits knew the mountains better than anyone alive. A single sweeping glance had been enough for him to grasp at once just what straits the three sisters were in.
"I'll lead you to the village you just saved. Follow me."
The three sisters looked the bandit over and murmured among themselves.
"Sister Yunchang. He's not lying, right?"
"From his bearing and movement, he is no impostor of the Black Mountain Bandits."
Having heard Guan Yu's opinion, Zhang Fei turned to Liu Bei this time.
"And you, Sister Xuande? You've an uncanny nose for traps."
"It doesn't feel like a trap to me, either."
Weighing the two opinions together, Zhang Fei nodded with a grin.
"Then let's be off!"